The album version of LAMENT should be heard as a studio reconstruction of a work primarily designed to be performed live, rather than an official new Einstürzende Neubauten LP proper.

In truth, the piece can only be fully realised, as well as best experienced, in its physical embodiment, performed on or by founding member Andrew Unruh’s gigantic instruments and noise generating devices that visually evoke the horrors the work describes or embeds in the sounds they conjure from the filth and terror of the industrialised 20th century world at war with itself.

But in fulfilling what at first appears to be a surprise commission for such a formidable longtime outsider group, Einstürzende Neubauten transformed the earthy, idiosyncratic contents they mined from academic, state, music hall and internet archives with the help of their two researchers into a richly complex cycle of original and cover songs and performance pieces.

The music often originated in LAMENT’s storytelling needs, be it in terms of sounds used or compositions structured along First World War flow charts or scored from calendars of the involvement of the 20 plus countries embroiled in it. The way LAMENT plays off pre-existing and composed materials, pieces clipped together from historical records next to direct cover interpretations, or indeed their Frankenstein like construction of an ur-anthem/national hymn delivers a differently angled history of the war.

Finally, LAMENT opens Bargeld’s case that the First World War never ended - the interwar and postwar periods being essentially pauses for breath as the great military powers carry on their conflict at some remove in faraway wars fought by proxy.

Pitched straight, this is Neubauten’s bitingly witty reconstruction of a commonstock national hymn rooted in an old anthem variously shared by a number of participants in the war, including the UK, Germany and Canada. That the major opposing powers were ruled by related monarchs didn’t blunt their desire to beat each other down. Here, the lyrics change language every two lines over its overfamiliar sombre melody.

The song changes tack in the last verse, which overwrites the multilingual doffed cap tributes to Europe’s monarchs with a few scathing lines of beery doggerel scrawled by Heinrich Hoffmann, author of Struwwelpeter/Shock Headed Peter.

The royal court was not amused, jailing Hoffmann for his wit. The last stanza is an anonymous persiflage which compared a king’s feasting on Christmas goose to his people’s diet of potato and herring pricks scraped from packing paper

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